Helsinki Design Lab's roots stretch back to 1968. In 2008 Sitra resurrected the initiative and operated it for five years. We are now closing this chapter of the project's life, and in doing so creating a living archive. Our intention is to open up the work of HDL as a useful platform for others who carry forward the mission of institutional redesign.

The full website will remain in place until at least the beginning of 2015. You are free to copy, remix, and extend the content here using a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. Below we've curated a shortlist of useful posts from this site's history.

All posts tagged HDL

This week we're posting the third and final studio recap video. If you've been following the previous weeks with Education and Sustainability, this is going to look pretty familiar.

These videos were created for parallel panel conversations at HDL Global 2010 so the original audience was only able to see one, thus the repetition was necessary to allow everyone to have the same introduction to the studio concept. Feel free to fast forward past the recipe section if you've already seen it twice!

If the animation has piqued your interest, the best place to find out more about the Ageing Studio is in the Dossier. Like the other Dossiers, you might want to start with the Challenge and Opportunity Space, which together outline the starting point for the studio, and then continue on with the Studio Summary which outlines where the studio ended their week together.

Currently we're hard at work trying to convert some of the "hunches" that the studio sketched out into prototype projects. More details as they emerge.

The themes of each of our three summer studios were borrowed as panel themes for HDL Global 2010. Last week we talked about the Education panel, and this week we're sharing the video from our Sustainability panel.

The goal of the panel sessions at HDL Global was to expand the work of the studio, which focused on an issue within Finland, to include input from the global community. You could think of it as a very (very) brief road testing session: is the broad thematic area of the studio dramatically different in other contexts? Might the studio concepts helpful elsewhere?

To find out more about the Sustainability Studio, the best place to look is here in the Dossier, our living archive. The Challenge and Opportunity Space which were part of the call to action, and the Summary which is a quick recap of where the Studio ended the week, are two good entry points.

Since the studio concluded we've been working on finding opportunities to convert some of the sketched "hunches" into prototype projects. That work is ongoing and we'll share developments here as they emerge.

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What is HDL?

Helsinki Design Lab uses strategic design to uncover the "architecture" of large-scale challenges and develop more holistic, complete solutions for improvement. We strive to advance knowledge, capability, and achievement in this discipline, regardless of geography or nationality. HDL most recently operated 2009-2013 and is now closed.